


The Spy Who Saw Light At The End Of The Tunnel

by apiphile



Series: the spy who... [4]
Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Genre: Bandages, Bargaining, Black Eyes, Blood, Bruises, Id Fic, London, M/M, STOP ENCOURAGING ME, Sadomasochism, Sarratt, Violent Sex, although not as much as you'll hate me, author seriously needs to see a therapist, broken people make the best spies, call-back to previous fics, car journeys, concussion, damaged people, don't read this seriously it's all wrong and you'll hate yourself, dub con, evasive manoeuvres, freeform tag field abuse, i did actual research and by research i mean i vaguely googled some stuff then ignored it, i disgust me, jesus christ what the fuck is wrong with you, just admit that you're a sadist, lies and the lying liars who tell them, lol the 70s, my Id is disgusting and alarming, no seriously dub con, peter guillam you are not well in your headmeats either, peter loves the porsche more than he loves most people, resignation, ricki tarr you are not well in your headmeats, sexual currency, so do the characters, this is all liza/jess/holly's fault, too much weather, unacknowledged issues, very very very dubious consent, what in the name of fuck am i doing, what the fuck is wrong with ME, why is finding a reliable stones discography so cunting difficult, written in gchat and edited by a monkey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-23
Updated: 2012-02-23
Packaged: 2017-10-31 14:46:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/345301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the last part in the "Spy Who" series, if you want this characterisation to make any sense you need to start at the beginning of that. </p>
<p>Ricki Tarr finally elucidates on the source of his feud with Verhoeven, but only after Guillam has become inextricably drawn into it and has no option but to start taking sides.</p>
<p>This is highly morally questionable, I already feel terrible for writing it, please don't hit me with sticks. Also seriously if you don't read the tags: DUB CON. VERY VERY DUBIOUS CONSENT.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Spy Who Saw Light At The End Of The Tunnel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jar/gifts), [LizaPod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LizaPod/gifts), [Holly Who Is Now Known As Omar](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Holly+Who+Is+Now+Known+As+Omar), [abbichicken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/abbichicken/gifts).



Because the stereo had been new when Richard left, and because Guillam was busy, and because he came home tired and because he associated music with parties and parties with sex, he hadn't played a single record on it since it arrived. There was still a sheath over the needle on the turntable.

It was a dismal, wet afternoon and he would have sat outside Lacon's office with Fawn like a slightly hungover statue for the rest of the day had Smiley not specifically put his head out the door and told him in no uncertain terms to go home. He might have gone to almost anywhere else in the world but home, but Smiley had said _home_ in the tone of grave concern other men said "hospital" or "dead" in, and so home he went.

He knew he'd been living at arm's length from his domestic life but nothing brought it to his attention quite as sternly as the sneezing fit that came on when he walked into his living room and stirred up the dust.

Guillam had meant to begin some sort of housework, some mindless task that would prevent him from either falling asleep in the middle of the day or dwelling too much on why he'd been sent home so emphatically, but then he meant to do a lot of things. Instead he looked through the smudged print of the instructions for the stereo, cleaned the turntable, reconnected the speakers from whatever life-endangering configuration Richard had thought was correct, and selected an LP at random from the few he had left. It was an American release.

He put _Out of Our Heads_ onto the turntable and thought, briefly, of how many years it had been since he'd bought this.

Guillam listened through the A side without really listening. He was convinced he was thinking hard about the problems of the day, but the problems of the day were beyond his remit and had taken place entirely behind a door of which he'd been sat on the wrong side. There was nothing for him - for most of them - to do but vegetate, get under the feet of the renovations at the Circus, and -

He rose, turned the record over, and placed the needle in the groove. 

\- and it was only when he returned to the sofa and the famous riff began that recalled that the other available options for occupation seemed to be fighting and getting on his nerves: viz., one Ricki Tarr.

Tarr had, predictably, reneged on his slippery and inconclusive word regarding Sarratt and bolted as soon as they arrived in Cheltenham. Guillam wasn't yet so blinded by tiredness and boredom that he didn't notice that his about-face and abrupt departure accompanied the arrival of a non-descript white van with the name of a fish supplier stencilled on the side, but he was also not so very concerned with Tarr's whereabouts that he'd wasted resources having it followed. Tarr's interminable and inexplicable feud with Verhoeven was, as long as both of them stayed out of the hospitals and the mortuaries, not his business or his problem.

He listened through the whole of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", watching his fingers tap on the arm of the sofa, in something of a daze. Tarr was not his problem unless Tarr made himself his problem. Again.

The next song was beginning.

The telephone rang.

Guillam froze in his seat as the phone and the stereo competed for his attention, and he made a quick inventory of who might be calling.

There was little use in making lists: he had an inkling already. Perhaps it was the song, perhaps it was the listlessness of the afternoon, perhaps it was only superstition.

But he was not surprised when he lifted the receiver from its cradle to hear a familiar and somewhat unwelcome voice say, "We've fixed the belt shaft on the motor, you can come in and get her any time now."

"When?" Peter sighed. At least Tarr wasn't breaking into his flat again.

"We close at six," Tarr said, through a mouthful of chewing gum. "Pick her up from the Petticoat garage, we had to move from the other."

Guillam nearly groaned aloud at the weakness of this. Clearly the absence of active assignments was making his field agents lazy and slapdash. There were no garages on Petticoat Lane, there simply wasn't room for them, and if anyone was listening on his home line (and God knew, they'd been listening almost everywhere else before Bill Haydon was exposed) they would have this information easily enough, and intercept Tarr long before Guillam arrived.

It was not until he'd already turned off the stereo, put his shoes back on, and left the flat with every security measure and sub-measure in place that Guillam thought he didn't particularly have any reason to be jumping to pay attention to the most errant of the Brixton house men. Tarr persisted in behaving as if he were returning from assignments when he'd been given none, and was in fact doing little more than compulsively running away from Verhoeven and then returning as if tethered to London by a rubber band.

The walk to Petticoat Lane took every last minute of the time allotted to him to get there for _five_ , and he arrived disconcertingly winded.

It took little enough meandering through the stalls (among which he looked grotesquely out of place, having dressed for nothing more that a day of haunting Lacon's doorstep) to find Tarr. The perennially poorly-behaved Australian drifted between the clothing racks, fondling the sleeves of cheap shirts as they sagged under hastily-erected blue tarpaulin eaves. He looked rather more in his element than Guillam, with his unconvincing swagger and his ridiculous Steve McQueen jacket.

He caught Guillam's eye, and Guillam looked away, ostensibly in embarrassment but in practice directing his attention to the cafe at the end of the street. Tarr moved on to a glove stall, swallowed up by the relentless patter in a hundred different accents, and Guillam pinballed slowly down towards the cafe, buying an unwanted pair of underpants with the fastidiousness of a man fallen on fictitious hard times; he slipped into the role too easily.

The cafe was so full of smoke that it spilled out into the wet air like liquid, so full of smoke that for a tense moment Guillam wondered if it wasn't really on fire, but he'd been in worse. His suit would require dry-cleaning, that was all.

He lit his own cigarette, acquired a cup of coffee he had no desire for, and crumpled himself into a corner with the affectation of the recently-broke. There had to be some explanation for why someone like him was somewhere like this, even if no one seemed to be paying attention.

Of course, he thought gloomily as the door opened again, draining the cafe of its strata of smoke only temporarily, they might just assume he was here to pick up, and have his teeth kicked in.

As Tarr presently arrived, he did little to dispel this suspicion. He picked up a coffee himself - no doubt from the same pot - and slid into the opposite seat without so much as a pretence at cover. He only dumped his body into the other chair and thumped his coffee cup onto the Formica with such force that both his drink and Guillam's slopped out.

"You're getting very lazy," Guillam observed, pulling his coffee away from the spreading puddle.

"Where is he?" Tarr asked, his mouth almost shut above a raised cup.

"Clacton. Staying in a safe house. That was a nasty trick."

Tarr shrugged. "So was trying to have me run down." He slurped inelegantly at his coffee, which must have been hot enough to scorch the inside of his mouth, although he gave no sign of it. "Why isn't he at Sarratt? You said he was going to Sarratt. Holding cells."

"Well did _you_ go?" Guillam asked, immediately irritated by the hypocrisy. He'd expected nothing less than both the betrayal and the complaint, but that didn't mean it wasn't mildly infuriating to find himself the head of a pack of violently squabbling _schoolchildren_ who did nothing but lie to him.

Tarr feigned deafness, evaded the question, and inhaled more of his volcanic coffee.

"In one piece this time?" Guillam asked, pushing his coffee to the end of the table. His cigarette burnt down toward the tip, but he found he had little taste for it. There was enough smoke in here already.

The smoke around them ate up the sound of Tarr's voice as it left his mouth in a flat-sided whisper: "Nothing for you to get your hands on."

Guillam ignored the stab and stared for a moment at the smouldering tip of his dying cigarette. He had a brief, piercingly clear image of himself pressing the heat to Tarr's lower lip until his skin blistered and burst, holding his mouth open with fingers far stronger than his fingers could have been. 

Alarmed, he stubbed it out in the ashtray.

Tarr watched him with half-closed and slightly swollen eyes. "What about if _I_ go to Sarratt?"

"What about it? You know where the shuttle leaves from. You'll have to explain what's happening to them." Guillam reached automatically for the coffee cup, reaching for something to put in his hands now the cigarette was gone. 

"So one of his _pals_ stabs me while I'm sleeping and you have to fill out fifty reports," Tarr said. The shrewd expression in his muddy eyes was enough for Guillam; he'd figured out the nature of their working relationship at every level now, and it felt disquieting, as if he'd been stripped naked in front of this indifferent audience of break-taking illegal market traders.

"I am not babysitting you. And Fawn's busy." Guillam took a mouthful of the coffee in order to avoid looking Tarr in his unnaturally puffy and sleepless face, and at once regretted it. The coffee was worse than the carpet-flavoured powdery instant that had been in vogue in the Circus for far too long, and possibly hotter than the surface of the sun. He spat it back into the mug in some scalded haste. "Who else do you trust?"

"Not including Smiley," said Tarr, who was evidently not stupid or optimistic enough to think the acting head of the Circus had any time for him at all at the moment, "you've exhausted the list." He necked more of the foul-tasting, scorching coffee without complaint. 

"What about Mendel?" Guillam asked, clutching at straws. The day was damp and dismal but not cold, and yet he wrapped his palms around the sides of the coffee cup as if they were freezing. It kept his hands from doing anything regrettable. 

A lull in conversation passed over the cafe - Guillam's grandmother would have said "an angel passed", and outside the rain was just audible thumping into the windows as the weather deteriorated a little further. The fug within made the precise nature of the weather impossible to determine, but Guillam would swear to seeing a few umbrellas turn abruptly inside-out.

"Because he'll come and do that, won’t he," Tarr said with a sneer that Guillam knew was as much a reflection of his own sarcasm as anything else. The intonation was more his than it was Tarr's, too. He wondered if this was conscious.

Guillam didn't say 'you win', because the idea was detestable. But he took his car keys from his pocket and held them in the palm of his hand. Tarr watched him without changing his expression, and gulped his coffee the way shift workers finished their ale.

When he got to his feet, Guillam looked up at him with a sigh. From beneath it was easier to see which of the swellings were the degeneration of too little sleep, and which were the fading remnants of a blow to the head. Tarr no longer looked triumphant, nor complacent, only hunted and uneasy.

"You understand," Guillam said, holding his keys between forefinger and thumb, "that for you to get the cell I have to know why he wants you dead."

He side-stepped as best he could the issue of why he was still sitting. Guillam pretended an interest in drinking some of his coffee, but his gag reflex and the sting in his mouth warned against it. The alternative would be to acknowledge in some way to Tarr that he was unexpectedly and loathsomely aroused by the defeat in his eyes.

"When we get there," Tarr suggested.

"On the way to my car," Guillam corrected. He turned the coffee cup around on the spot. "I don't have the time to --"

"Smiley sent you home," Tarr said, still standing before him with his hands wedged into the pockets of his absurd Steve McQueen jacket, his imitation of Guillam's haircut looking greasy and tousled. Instead of leaving this to hang above them as evidence of his superior legwork, Tarr only said, "I was looking for you."

Which meant Fawn. No one else would have both known and cared to tell Tarr, or known and known Tarr could be, in as much as anyone could be, trusted with the information.

"You'll tell me," Guillam said, without moving. Tarr stood leaning into his hips, looking very much as if he'd be chewing gum if he still had it with him. "I can't get you into the bloody secure cells if I don't have something to give them."

"You're Smiley's right hand," Tarr muttered, staring at the table rather than Guillam's face.

"How much water do you suppose _that_ holds?" Guillam was aware of having been manoeuvred - clumsily, too - into the position of being directly responsible for this human traffic accident. He was sure he'd been disclaiming it vehemently and now somehow he'd tried twice to throw the bugger at Sarratt and keep him there for his own safety. "These days?"

More importantly, the danger of humiliation had passed: Guillam stood up, knocking his coffee hard enough to spill it, and made an abortive gesture of thanks to the turned back of the proprietress.

The damp, exhaust-laden air of East London was like a pastoral holiday after the confines of the cafe, and as cigarette smoke trailed out behind them Guillam breathed in deep as a miner released from the darkness. Unfortunately, he thought with uncharacteristic poetry as they turned the corner together, as conspicuous as coppers on the beat, his shadow came with him.

They walked in silence, which Guillam appreciated.

Perhaps it was the content of their last few encounters which drove it, or perhaps it was only the aggressively hostile weather, but Guillam appreciated far less the way his thoughts returned not to the problem of separating and containing Verhoeven (holed up not in Clacton but in Holloway) but to Tarr's body.

They dwelt on the healing process and the wounds which Verhoeven had inflicted, which Guillam might be able to excuse as concern if that didn't feel almost worse than the truth; they returned again and again to the texture of his mouth, the shape of his cock, the gently disintegrating hardness of his stomach smeared with blood.

Guillam shook his head to clear it, and succeeded only in getting raindrops and his own hair in his eyes as the wind whipped both about.

"You look ill," he said at last, watching the pedestrians on the street, and not Tarr's face.

"Well enough to deal with you," Tarr said, and this time it wasn’t a come-on but a warning. He said, _I may look weak but if you try to break me I will fight you_ , but he said it without speaking.

"Where were you this time?" Guillam asked, still watching the pedestrians for any sign of the too-casual-to-be-casual, the subtle tells of tails. The hunched shoulders and disobedient black umbrellas moved like river detritus on the tide's turn, along the wet pavement. The smell of hot, wet earth rose from the streets.

"Cirencester."

Not far from Cheltenham, not far from London. If he'd been running properly, even within the country, he'd have carried himself to Newcastle, Liverpool: somewhere a little further from Verhoeven's circle of influence, and from the Circus. The problem, Guillam thought, was that what he needed protection from and what he thought could protect him from it were in very close proximity.

That, and Tarr was clearly running out of money. If he'd had any to begin with he would be holed up in Jakarta by now and firmly out of Guillam's hair.

"Why did you come back?" Guillam asked, thrusting his hands uncomfortably into his pockets. "The truth, or something that can pass for it, this time. No more of this servile nonsense, we both know you don't mean it."

"Couldn't afford not to," Tarr said, almost sullenly. A passing car sluiced them both with a slow-motion spray of fallen rain water (littered with drowned cigarette butts and all the effluvia of a London storm drain); neither of them jumped out of the way, and Tarr didn't even bother to shout after the driver.

"But you can afford London?"

"Other income," Tarr said. They might have been two friends out for a walk in the rain - Guillam balked at the very idea - or a lawyer walking his client back to the office after an unconventionally informal meeting. Their company was incongruous, but not notably uncomfortable, Guillam thought.

Other income. A burn list; Tarr's selection of potential blackmail victims.

"And none of your other income is anywhere else in the country?"

"They're less forthcoming," Tarr said, employing a particular selection of vowels that made him sound like Smiley. Or how Smiley would sound were he thirty years younger and Australian.

"Fancy that," Guillam said, borrowing a phrase from his grandmother with all the sarcasm she used to imbue it with. "So if you burn _me_ -" It was the first time he'd said it out loud, "- for a sufficient bankroll, does that end with you out of the country?"

"You don't have that kind of money," Tarr sighed. He sounded truly disappointed.

"No," Guillam agreed. There was a curious sense of conclusion in the conversation. It felt light, unencumbered by the tensions of the previous sparring matches, where Tarr had been compelled to torment him and keep something in reserve for future use. This time his resignation was a work of art. "And if I give you enough to send you to the darker recesses of, oh, Cornwall?"

Tarr laughed. It was one, short, bitten-off "hah" and it sounded as if it had never been acquainted with humour. Guillam stared at him, startled by the outburst and worried by the potential attention it must have attracted.

"Until it runs out, I'll stay where you put me, right," Tarr said, with the mercenary bluntness of a man who has exhausted all his other options. 

"Including Sarratt?" 

"Yeah."

The noises of London swallowed up their wretched conversation - and it _was_ wretched, Guillam thought, a wretched negotiation - and left only a thick, prickly silence into which all the adjacent conversations flooded, abhorring a vacuum.

He was no longer a threat, Guillam thought. That must be the key. His resignation, his sudden meekness. The puffiness of his face, the loss of weight. 

Guillam allowed himself a sideways glance to appraise the most poisonous, difficult scalp-hunter currently under his aegis. The sensation rose up his spine like a slow, hot tide. 

He was perturbed by the savagery with which he wanted to fuck him. 

The desire presented itself in those terms: blunt, without anguished euphemism or excuse. Guillam swallowed a mouthful of spit and lengthened his stride. Either Tarr kept up, or Tarr didn't keep up.

He looked back: Tarr kept up. Sarratt would be a bureaucratic quagmire at present, but there was to be no avoiding the journey. Tarr had to be interred into a cell (in practice a hut) and Guillam had to give a tedious account of all the mutual murder attempts that he had been quietly shoving in the bottom drawer of his desk. With no great delicacy he might circumvent any mention of what, precisely, Tarr had been doing to try to gain his protection, although he’d have to come with some reason for why he’d made no mention of the whole mess to anyone else sooner. 

"Might need something to eat on the way, all right," Tarr said, dredging the words out of a dead conversation and cutting through Guillam's visions of future paperwork like a bulldozer. 

"What happened to all your friends, Ricki Tarr?" Guillam asked, under his breath. 

Tarr must have been listening closely: the street was drowning in slackening rain, the many-rhythmed slap of shoe leather on pavement, the hiss and rumble of cyclists and cars stopping and starting, and the senseless hubbub of voices that seemed to arise from London like steam from a hot pot even when no one nearby was talking; but he still answered.

"Seems I don't have many," Tarr acknowledged with a certain sourness. Guillam turned to watch him throw his head back into the remains of the rain and turn his swollen eyes to the dirty drops. "Left, or alive. In England."

The qualifiers were there for security, he was sure. Tarr couldn't afford to be truly friendless, or he'd have no defence against Guillam at all. The thought made Guillam's chest contract and his head pound, and he looked away at the shuffling feet of the city for the sake of his pulse.

"And Verhoeven does," Guillam said. The sparsity of the conversation reminded him a little of those he'd had the privilege of seeing Smiley conduct, where the tubby and unthreatening old man left vast silences for his interlocutors to tumble into. The small pride he felt at this comparison was by no means a surprise; Smiley, he felt sure, would have handled this better.

Tarr said, "About that food."

_You sound like an especially desperate rent boy_ , Guillam thought. _This_ comparison was unpleasant. He'd never been so foolish, but there were things one couldn't help overhearing, round Piccadilly and particular streets. Sometimes it was possible to catch the same hungry intonation in six or seven different voices, in one walk; a whole gaggle of teenage boys offering their mouths in exchange for something to eat, somewhere to sleep, and a cigarette or two.

"Yes?" Guillam was expecting him to reply, _you'll have to pay for it_ ; Tarr was clearly down to pennies, and there was a likelihood the last had gone on that revolting coffee. No wonder he'd been so eager to drink it.

The pause in conversation reached an unnatural duration as a crocodile of soggy schoolgirls - seven or eight years old at most - wove between them in their identical uniforms, shoving each other and cackling like tiny witches. Guillam thought, _there is nothing to stop me from walking in the other direction_ , but of course Tarr knew where he lived.

"If the inquisitors are getting their practice on me," Tarr said, leaning too close to Guillam in compensation for their sudden parting, "I need to eat first, all right? Or I'm no good. Not running on all cylinders, am I."

Guillam would have said that Ricki Tarr had never been running on all cylinders, but he kept the derisive snort to himself and only said, "No one's interrogating you."

"You said they'd want to know." 

"Well yes," Guillam said, skirting a woman with a white cane and jerking Tarr's sleeve without thinking to make him do the same. "I would rather you _told_ me. Or them. Without the inquisitors having to dust down their equipment."

"Right," said Tarr. He sounded unconvinced.

"Paperwork," Guillam explained. Involving the inquisitors - which had not crossed his mind until Tarr nervously edged towards it - was a business that required an unfortunate number of reports. They would need recording equipment, which had to be signed out, at present. They would require either a stenographer or a transcriber, and most of them were currently at Central Station, or off.

They became entangled in the coagulation of tourists and resident walkers at the edge of the road as pedestrian crossing lights before them glowed red and the traffic growled and bounced past in ugly stop-motion. 

"Right," Tarr said again.

Though a few weeks previously he would have denied it and expunged any notion of responsibility for doing it, Guillam said, "I can keep him off you, but you have to cooperate."

"I'm cooperating, aren't I?" Tarr said petulantly, as the lights changed. "I'm coming along quietly, aren't I?"

They were in the middle of the road when Tarr added:

"Or was this not the kind of cooperation you meant?"

And Guillam felt a fierce and sudden desire to finish what Verhoeven had started by shoving Tarr into the path of a speeding motorcycle and filling out one accidental death form and thus ridding himself of the responsibility, the irritation, and the accurate appraisal in one act of murder.

He made it to the far side of the road without introducing Tarr's skull to anything too solid for it to survive, and manifestly failed to answer the question.

"Didn't know we had a house in Clacton," Tarr said eventually, as they shouldered their way through the crowds and out of the bottleneck, into quieter streets. 

He meant "The Circus", but the word "we" sat ill with Guillam all the same. It was too presumptuous. Too familiar. 

"It's a flat," he said.

"Right," Tarr repeated. "Right."

"And do you really think you're privy to every property the Circus has access to?" Guillam went on, slightly irritated. 

"Right," Tarr said, in something that could pass for deference if Guillam had thought him capable of it. "He's _staying_ there?" Tarr added, preoccupied and pulling on his own hair in some over-eager attempt to arrange it; the wind made a mockery of his grooming.

"He doesn't have much choice," Guillam said. The streets were becoming more familiar. They were not close to his flat, yet, but close enough that his feet knew the way. He was pleased with himself for not snarling, this time. "That was a nasty trick."

Tarr shrugged. 

"How did you afford that?" Guillam added, crossing the minor road in front of them with barely a glance to either side. "You can't even buy yourself lunch."

As they mounted the far pavement a facsimile of the old, wicked smile curved Tarr's inappropriately luxuriant mouth, and he mimed handwriting with a hand that bore a dirty, smudged bandage across the knuckles. "Dear Sir," he intoned, "I remember our time together in Penrith with fondness _and clarity_..."

_Fuck you_ , thought Guillam, as Tarr's moment of triumph faded from his face and left him looking unduly haggard. It was rare that Guillam felt any sympathy for the victims of scalp-hunter burning, as they were usually the contacts too intractable or unbiddable to be bought any other way, but when he was merely another name on a list of potential "income sources" it was a trifle difficult not to find himself siding with the fat and hopeless married ministers Tarr's mouth had serviced.

"You went to all that trouble," Guillam said instead, trying to force a sense of schadenfreude where there was none to be had: he was too close to the imminent catastrophe, too likely to be sucked into it, "and Verhoeven still isn't dead. Quite the waste of your money." And, in the process, he'd burned out his "other income", no doubt, along with several bridges.

In response, as they passed from the streets full of shops into the streets full of houses, Tarr said an extraordinary thing. 

"I don't want him dead," he said, his hands in his pockets and his face once again raised to the glowering skies as if he was trying to wash the fatigue and bruising from him, "I just don't want him to kill _me_."

It was, Guillam reflected, as he found the end of his road, quite unusual for Tarr to express an opinion either way about his desire for someone's death. In previous, professional dealings he'd treated fatalities as a little like spilled milk: something that was messy, possibly avoidable, but since someone else was going to be cleaning it up there was no point in his making an especial effort to avoid them. 

"And if I ask him," Guillam said, taking his car keys from his pocket, "will he say the same thing?"

Tarr only shrugged.

They drew level with the Porsche. Guillam's suit was damp, and Tarr's hair in disarray. The drive to Sarratt would be long enough to dry Guillam out, but he held little hopes for restoring Tarr's habitual vanity when he slumped so.

"You're lying," Guillam said simply, unlocking the passenger door first.

Tarr flashed him the broken pieces of a smile, and drooped into the passenger seat. Guillam recalled the last time Tarr had been in his car: it had been swelteringly hot, miserably bright, and Tarr had sucked him off with Guillam's fingernails digging into his jugular. 

He took a steadying breath and unlocked the driver's side.

"All right," Tarr said, covering his face with his hands. He slumped down in the seat as Guillam positioned himself in his, and as the engine turned over he let his hands remain plastered to his face. 

The bandage across his knuckles was fraying, unravelling, but not bloodied. Guillam wondered with a kind of detachment what had happened to his hand, but that avenue of thought was only likely to lead to further trouble.

The Porsche pulled away from the curb.

Guillam considered snapping at him to belt up, but rapidly decided that if Ricki Tarr's forehead went through the windscreen it counted as accidental death and an insurance claim, which was still less of a problem than Sarratt was going to be.

He glanced at Tarr, who had yet to remove his hands from his face and appeared to be trying to push down the swelling in his eye sockets with the heels of his hands. 

"I need to sleep," Tarr mumbled. 

Guillam sped up. The roads to Sarratt would be clogged like a Lord's arteries, at least until he left the city, and the painful stop-start could do little but remind him of the last trip he'd taken in Tarr's company. Grim and oppressive clouds and spitting rain aside, there was an echo of that hot day already overwhelming in the interior of the Porsche, and the windows had steamed up.

"Can I sleep now?" Tarr asked, addressing his hands. "Please?"

"Can I stop you?" Guillam muttered.

He meant, _stop asking me permission. Why are you doing that **now**?_. 

Tarr's exhausted stillness, his questions which slithered from his characteristic evasive defiance now into near-plaintiveness did little for Guillam's concentration. 

He returned his attention to the road, to the evening traffic, to rush-hour. The tempo of Tarr's breathing dropped to a drowsy rumble, and Guillam dug his fingers into the leather cover of the steering wheel.

All about him, cars, buses, taxis, and possibly suicidal cyclists roared, purred, and zipped around each other. London ground through the soggy evening, emptying out to the suburbs as offices became silent, dark rooms. Tarr's bandaged hand dribbled from his face, dropping inelegantly onto his chest. The hillocks of leather held it in place, uncurling and limp.

Again, Guillam pulled his attention back to the road.

Regardless of their last interaction, regardless of how fragile Tarr came to look, hungry and sleeping with the residue of fights clinging to him like the sweat and grime of the city, there was nothing appropriate in Guillam's overpowering desire to halt the car, straddle the bastard, and beat him awake to be kissed. Even if it hadn't been unprofessional, dangerous, and a breach of the Queen's peace, there was Verhoeven's fate to be borne in mind.

Whatever else, Verhoeven was finished as an inconspicuous infiltrator of ordinary society. Whoever Tarr had hired - Guillam peered at him, snoring damply in the passenger seat with his unbandaged hand draped across his eyes - had seen to that. He had been disinclined to make any enquiries after who it might have been, but instinct told him the connection was criminal rather than military.

Guillam shook his head and crawled along behind a delivery van with the wipers going. There wasn't quite enough rain to make them necessary, but there was slightly too much of it to make them unnecessary. His suit jacket smelled unpleasantly of wet wool and his trousers clung to his thighs, and Tarr, in the seat beside him, made a low sound in his throat and repositioned his shoulders.

If he were a sensible man, he'd stop dwelling on the bright blue skies that had hung over the car and the texture of Tarr freshly-washed hair between his fingers. From the looks for things, Tarr hadn't washed it since then; Guillam dragged his eyes back to the license plate of the delivery van. 

If he were a sensible man, and he was trying to be, he would also keep his mind off the rather more disturbing pleasantness of Tarr's flank wound embracing his inquisitive (alright, _sadistic_ ) forefinger. 

Guillam found himself trying to locate the spots beneath the folds of Tarr's zipped up coat that must by now hold two magnificent scars.

He chided himself for the word _magnificent_.

If he were a sensible man, Guillam thought, as the delivery van in front of him pulled away at speed, he would remind himself that however exhausted and malnourished Tarr looked, he had still extorted money from former _fucks_ to pay for someone to throw vitriol in the face of someone he'd worked with.

It ought to cast Tarr in a very different light.

The headlights of an adjacent taxi, turned on in the gloom despite the sun still lingering in the sky like a bad smell in a windowless room, poured through the rain-streaked window and illuminated the far side of Tarr's face. The light that they cast him in there was somewhere between the angelic and the profane, but Guillam - who had never been especially religious outside of the requirements of family and school - only saw how it highlighted the bruises forming. 

His far hand had slipped from his eyes and lay awkward and diagonal over his mouth; his eyelashes were gummed with sleep, their surrounds darkening. Whatever had happened had presumably happened not long before he'd called Guillam at home. 

Guillam wondered if he'd run afoul of Fawn before he managed to explain what he was doing. Then again, Tarr could still walk.

The car behind him honked angrily, and Guillam eased his foot down on the accelerator with a guilty start.

"Wzhtz," Tarr said, lifting his bandaged hand and holding the inside of his elbow over his eyes. Guillam wondered how anyone came to be so used to sleeping upright and in daylight that he retained the instinct to cover his eyes even while dreaming.

Then again, he'd grown up in prison. He supposed it was par to the course.

The delivery van stopped abruptly, and Guillam stamped on the brake pedal only just in time to keep the front of his beloved Porsche from carving a vast dent into the back of it. He winded himself on his seat-belt: Tarr, on the other hand, pitched forwards and banged his elbow on the dashboard, followed in quick succession by his head. 

" _Fuck_ ," Tarr yelped, very much awake. "What happened?"

"Traffic," Guillam said. The delivery van pulled off again, amid a flurry of honks, as if the road were filled with indignant geese. He eased on the accelerator again, and almost immediately had to step on the brakes. "For God's sake."

"Ow," Tarr said, in a low voice. He tried to roll his jacket sleeve up to look at his elbow, but the cuff was too tight and the sleeve too bulky; Guillam returned to staring resolutely at the road.

"Seatbelt," Guillam suggested, as he stopped, started, started, stopped, and crept along the road in a state of great frustration. The wipers began to squeak; he switched them off, and the windscreen filled with a distracting array of rain spots.

Tarr struggled about in the passenger seat: Guillam watched the delivery van, and stopped, and started, and stopped, and started. He exhaled, long and slow and impatient. 

"Can't," Tarr said, and with a great twist he threw his absurd Steve McQueen jacket onto the rear seats.

"Can't?" The delivery van made it a full twenty yards up the road before Guillam had to stamp on the brakes again, and this time Tarr managed to throw out his arm to brace himself.

"Can't," Tarr said. "Belt goes right over that, it's ... sore, all right?"

Guillam very pointedly and carefully did not steal a single glance sideways. The junction was not much further ahead, and if luck was running his way - which it hadn't so far today - they might be away and out of this grinding stop-start-stop crawl soon.

"I thought we employed a hardier calibre of man than this," Guillam said, addressing himself to the back of the delivery van, leaning on the steering wheel. "I had no idea our scalp hunters were so prone to whining about a banged elbow and a few scabs."

"Not been down Brixton house much, then, have you?" Tarr muttered peevishly. Guillam looked to see him putting on his seatbelt, and wincing immediately afterward.

Tarr was correct, which Guillam disliked. The occasional occupants of the building in Brixton veered between bravado and oversensitivity with an alacrity befitting the manifestly unstable collective they were. None, of course, had the inconsiderate poor timing to transform themselves into shuddering basket cases while they were in the field, but they quite often came down with a bad dose of self-pity while drinking off their debriefing.

After some fidgeting with the seatbelt Tarr succeeded in slouching in a position that appeared to aggravate his wounds the least. Guillam could see nothing seep through his shirt, and no sign of anything but sweat having come through before. Perhaps he was not infected, only healing slowly.

The delivery van snuck smoothly ahead in one continuous motion, and as Tarr's head drooped against the window Guillam offered a rare prayer for a quiet journey.

* * *

When the Porsche pulled up the driveway to Sarratt the light was dimming: too light for headlights but too dark to be able to read by. Rabbits, startled out of complacency in their dusk feeding by the sound of the engine, hopped away from the edge of the road, and Tarr sat up straight and stared, blurred and softened by sleep, into the falling night.

"Thought there was going to be food," he mumbled, pawing at his face. Guillam changed down a gear and the Porsche whispered along the long haul from gatehouse to building.

"There are kitchens at Sarratt," Guillam pointed out with laboured patience. In the relative silence of his drive he'd had time to piece together what, precisely, he was supposed to tell Sarratt about this. He'd drawn a careful line after which no one was to receive any further information, calculated roughly how far he thought he could push _Smiley's Right Hand_ as a reason for not being asked questions, and contemplated the many sleeping poses of Ricki Tarr more times than he was comfortable with.

Once, taking a difficult corner, his knee had swung across the invisible barrier between driver and passenger seat, and come to a rest against Tarr's. The warm pressure of a living body against his, even so briefly and so innocuously, had constricted his throat and driven him to jerk his leg away with paranoid haste.

Tarr made a face. The kitchens at Sarratt served prisoners, returning field men, the inquisitors, and rarely visitors. They were not renowned for producing anything above the standard of the average public school's food, which was acceptable to the majority of the Circus, who had been inculcated with the acceptance if not love of over-boiled flavourless pap through boarding. 

Tarr himself was hardly a gourmet but Guillam understood that it was considered a great triumph against the forces of adversity to persuade the Sarratt kitchen staff (or what was left of them) to so much as fry something.

Guillam brought the car around to the back of the outbuildings, and turned off the engine. Rather than springing out of the Porsche and going in search of Evans or anyone else to whom he might conceivably report, he said, "There's an apple in the glove box."

Tarr made a face. In common with the majority of the Circus (Guillam guiltily included: there was a good reason the thing had been in the glove box for a while), he regarded fruit as a last resort after foraging in bins.

A lone figure crossed the grass in front of them with a brisk, military step. It had clearly stopped raining, and he moved without the hunched shoulders that came naturally to people moving through worse weather.

Guillam rolled the window down.

"David!" he called. "You don't happen to know which huts are ready for use?"

David Evans broke his step for a moment, dithered on the lawns, and called back, "Fourteen and eight. Evening, Peter," before moving off again without further conversation. They might have nothing to do in Sarratt at present, Guillam thought ruefully, but that didn't mean they were any more inclined to small talk than they had been before.

"I thought you said no inquisitors?" Tarr asked, nervously unbuckling his seatbelt. He twisted to reach for his jacket and as he did Guillam saw the grimace of pain flare across his sleep-smeared features.

"More secure," Guillam said, getting out of the car. "Or would you rather sleep in the main building where no one needs an excuse to come and shoot you in the head in the night?"

Tarr gave him an ugly look as he climbed out, carrying his jacket. Even after Guillam had closed and, unusually for his visits to Sarratt, _locked_ the Porsche, Tarr didn't put the absurd thing back on but carried it over his arms like a schoolboy.

There was indeed something reminiscent of a first day at school in the way that Tarr followed him through the coppice and out to the far huts, each enclosed behind its own double-perimeter fence (for all the good that had done Bill Haydon, Guillam thought, and he wondered if Tarr was thinking the same thing). It put Guillam in mind of arriving at prep, four years old and dazed, for when he'd started at Stroud he was already a seasoned boarder and the vast stone building had held few horrors for him at first.

Hut Fourteen was, thankfully, not the low brick cottage outside which Bill Haydon had met his maker, but slightly farther from the outer perimeter of the grounds. It lay on the outskirts of a cluster of huts, a red brick pariah with barbed wire coils lying atop a double row of chain-link fences like especially aggressive clouds about a mountaintop.

In every other way, it was the identical sibling of the huts it nestled among, but that the lights were switched off. 

Guillam pushed the door open - no need to lock it when there was no one and no equipment inside - and after some groping turned on the lights. He made no sarcastic remarks about the Hotel du Sarratt; they'd both heard them all before. 

Shadowless strip lighting buzzed and hummed as it warmed up, casting a sickly glow over mint-green walls. The paint had been applied directly over the breize blocks that made up the inner wall, as there was no need to hide any microphones in the plaster here (and a penny saved on plaster was a penny spent on better microphones or - more likely - on fractionally less awful coffee for the main building).

Tarr said, "Better than being shot in the head, right."

The hut was divided into three narrow rooms, accessible from this entrance, and a watch room accessible from the other entrance, through which every movement of the prisoner, visitor, or returning field man was observed. 

The three rooms were bedroom (a dismal single pad on an iron bedframe, and no control over when the lights were on or off), bathroom (a hand basin and a lavatory, both visible from the watchroom; no one staying in the huts was permitted to shower, and all of the bathing was done at the main building), and a main room which, among other things, was used for interrogation without equipment. The desk was bolted to the concrete floor, as were the chairs.

Guillam closed the door behind them both and, after a pause, locked it. He considered what would happen if Smiley wanted to get hold of him, and he wasn't at home.

He then considered what the likelihood was, given Smiley's regular seclusion with Lacon at present excluding even Fawn, that Smiley would try to find him at all. It was insultingly small.

"There," Guillam said. As a closing statement he felt it lacked something.

Under the strip light the bruises seemed darker - perhaps they had come out more on the journey - and Tarr more exhausted than ever, despite his recent sleep. 

He caught Guillam's eye and for an incalculably long time, during which Guillam's palms began to sweat, they only held the other's gaze. _Say thank you_ , Guillam thought, crossly, but he said nothing aloud.

At last, Tarr laid his jacket awkwardly, and too slowly on the bolted-down desk. 

"You had vitriol thrown at Verhoeven's face," Guillam said in a low voice. "How am I supposed to square that with Whitehall if it ever gets back to them?"

Tarr only shrugged, his arms held stiffly by his sides. "He was trying to kill me."

"You were trying to kill _him_ ," Guillam reminded him. The surroundings made the questions infinitely easier; this was a room built for asking difficult questions in, and Tarr knew it. Outside the night fell deeper, grey swallowed by black as the sun dropped below the horizon.

Tarr's pupils had dilated in the dark. Guillam tried to remember the mnemonic for the list of signs of deception in the face, but Tarr displayed the full array so regularly it seemed pointless.

"Ricki," Guillam snapped, exasperated into using his name at last and immediately angry that he had, "if you don't tell me exactly what the _fuck_ is going on between the two of you I will finish Verhoeven's job for him--" he caught himself, his hands clenched into fists and his shirt cuffs tight around the tense tendons of his wrists, and said in a calmer voice, "--or I will turn you over to the inquisitors. They're bored."

To his surprise, Tarr laughed, and rubbed his face. "What do they tell you in interrogation training? Always have something to hold back, right."

" _Do as you're told_ ," Guillam growled, struggling to keep his hands to himself. Hut Fourteen was a long way from the main building, and tired though Tarr was he was still not entirely convinced that he'd come out on top in a fight.

"And if I don't have your _curiosity_ anymore," Tarr said, unbuttoning his shirt collar, "I don't fucking have anything, do I?"

" _Do as you're damn well told,_ " Guillam rasped, his throat as clenched as his fists with the effort of not seizing Tarr by the throat and shaking answers out of him like a terrier with a rat.

"You won't believe me, all right," Tarr said, unbuttoning his shirt cuffs. The slow, matter-of-fact strip-tease was impressively sexless until Guillam recalled the wince that had accompanied the seatbelt; then the images of the knife wound, of the ill-advised and regrettable encounter in Guillam's _own bloody bathroom_ returned to him. His face grew hot in the unheated room. "You'll say I'm lying."

"Then perhaps you should have tried telling the truth in the first place instead of lying about it _then_ ," Guillam snarled. He knew perfectly well that the inquisitors were required to keep their temper. He'd seen George Smiley interviewing people and wearing them down with patient, emotionless, bland questions until they spat out more than they intended; his own method had usually owed a great deal to flirtatious politeness, especially with women. But Tarr infuriated him. 

"You wouldn't believe me then, either," Tarr said. He undid the buttons of his shirt down to the belt, and untucked it with a brisk movement of his wrists that seemed designed to avoid jerking his sides. 

Guillam wrenched his gaze away from the places he believed the knife wounds to have been, and back to Tarr's face. At least there was no stench of victory about him; if anything, he looked desperate.

Guillam's face grew hotter.

With another wince, Tarr turned at the waist and flung his shirt after his jacket. His undershirt was clean, or as clean as a garment that has been repeatedly slept in could be: there were no blood stains, no seeping tide marks of pus, nothing to indicate a fresh wound or the poor healing of an old one.

The tendons in Guillam's wrists relaxed and his fingers uncurled as he recognised in himself a sense of _disappointment_ at this. He found he was leaning forward on the balls of his feet, trying to see beneath the undershirt through effort of will alone.

"So," Tarr said, reaching down to untuck his undershirt, "whatever it is you're going to do." He peeled the undershirt off and hurled it haphazardly at the rest of his clothes, standing naked to the waist under the impersonal fluorescent lights, "Do it, right? Go on."

There was a black and purple bruise the size of a football across Tarr's torso and in it the shiny pink of a recent scar stood out like a bright penny. The hue and spread of it matched the depth of his double black eyes, and the dark blossom of burst blood vessels below the skin must surely have been inflicted at the same time.

Guillam took a steadying breath. Like a small boy with an injured friend, he found he wanted to poke it, to see Tarr wince again, and pull away from his hand. He wanted to hold him steady and jab at the bruise until he hissed.

"I don't _care_ ," Tarr said, sounding much like a small boy himself. "Do it. All right? Do it."

There were many times in Peter Guillam's life when he had _lunged_ at someone. They had been connected, almost exclusively, with the preservation of life and the removal of a threat. He had lunged at men with guns (and spent hours afterwards trying to laugh the adrenaline off); he had lunged, once or twice, when he was drunk enough, at pretty art student boys who had been giving him the come-on on for the last three or four hours and not putting out.

Now it seemed as though time had taken a holiday from linear progression and he found himself no longer standing apart from Tarr but with one hand in his greasy, unwashed hair and the other scrabbling at his shoulder.

He might have been less aghast at himself had this been in the throes of passion; for all that he hated Ricki Tarr there was an undeniable handsomeness to him and kissing him had, in those unfortunately unforgettable moments of unprofessional conduct, been more than pleasant. Instead, he propelled Tarr into the mint-green wall with a violent bodily shove that caught him in the haematoma, and bounced his skull side-first off the breize blocks.

"No--" Tarr grunted, trying to brace himself. Guillam kicked him in the back of the knee and slammed his head into the wall again, his hands seeking greater purchase on Tarr's hair, on his _face_.

Tarr arched his back, tried to grab at Guillam and push him away, but in this respect Guillam's longer frame did him good. He remained out of reach, and thumped Tarr's head off the wall a third time.

"TELL ME WHAT YOU DID," Guillam shouted. He had meant to say it as steadily as he could, but it came out as a roar, echoing off the walls of the hut and rebounding into his own ears with all its fury intact. "TELL ME. I AM SICK OF YOUR _FUCKING LIES_ , TARR. TELL ME."

"Stop --" Tarr yelped, trying to twist his body out from under Guillam's grip; his lack of food, his diminished sleep worked against him, and Guillam felt his heart pound and his blood thunder at the thought of _winning_. Tarr could not beat him in this fight after all. Tarr would go down. He would fall. He would _suffer_.

Guillam's vision blurred a little with the heat of his face and the warmth in his muscles.

He smashed Tarr's face against the wall again and heard a crunch over the sound of two interlocking choruses of panted breaths. There was a moment when he thought he might let go Tarr and regain his suddenly-vanished and much-strained equilibrium; then he saw the bright red cascading over Tarr's mouth, dripping off his chin, and his muscles _shook_ with the desire to keep going, to keep hitting him until he fell.

"What did you _do_ ," Guillam groaned, and his hand slithered down the side of Tarr's face, losing his grip in the sweat. His voice sounded unsteady, a little unhinged, even to his own ears.

"I turned him down," Tarr gasped, dripping blood from his nose onto the empty floor, "I turned him down I turned him down I turned him down _please stop hitting me_."

Guillam felt something cold unwind in the pit of his stomach and for a moment he was sure he would not stop, that he would keep hurling Tarr face-first against the wall until he had no more face to break. He felt light, weightless; his body seemed to belong to someone else, his hands utterly alien, and something like laughter ate at him from within. " _He tried to kill you because --_ "

"I broke his collarbone," Tarr reminded him, trying to raise his arm above his head, presumably to protect himself. "I turned him down, I broke his collarbone, I called him a poof, he stabbed me."

"You turned him down," Guillam repeated, unsure if he was going to laugh, or scream, or smash Tarr's head into the wall again.

Tarr started to laugh, spraying blood across the concrete. Guillam could not find it in himself to release his hand from Tarr's hair. His fingers tightened in their moorings, and he groped blindly at Tarr's shoulder: Tarr did not throw him off.

"If I'd known it was going to be like this I'd have just fucking said yes," Tarr wheezed, and another glob of blood fell onto the concrete, splashing.

"God," Guillam muttered, and without thinking he pulled Tarr's head to the side. His face was a bloody mask from the nose down, his eyes peering blindly from two swollen black-and-puple bruises. He looked as if he should be the star of a police report.

Guillam kissed him.

He tasted of copper pennies, and he didn't struggle.

The position was no doubt painful, and Guillam saw no reason to let him out of it, to let go of his hair. He thought vaguely that he would not be able to get the blood out of his clothes if he left them on, and that Tarr had been sensible to remove his. Then again, perhaps Tarr had known this was coming.

Tarr fidgeted and shifted so much then that Guillam wondered if perhaps smacking his head into the wall again would be useful, but he didn't want to stop kissing him. The taste of blood filled his mouth, and Tarr's lips were slippery and soft, yielding and cooperative (unlike anything else of his).

The fidgeting was summarily revealed to be the undoing of Tarr's jeans, and their brisk removal: he was not - Guillam grabbed his hip, unseeing - he was not wearing underwear.

Guillam's erection was no longer possible for him to ignore.

Tarr mumbled something into his mouth and with extreme reluctance Guillam disengaged his, pulling back on Tarr's hair with displeasure. "What?"

"Do it," Tarr hiccupped, dribbling blood out from between his lips, "Do it, then. All right? Do it."

"No," Guillam said, pulling his head back until his neck was bent into a painful curve, and Tarr had to scrabble at the wall to keep from overbalancing. "No, fuck you." He swallowed, and Tarr swallowed in suit, his vulnerable Adam's apple bobbing painfully the length of his exposed throat. "No, you _want this_."

It came to him that fast, that suddenly that he didn't appreciate the significance of it until much later. Tarr only nodded feebly in his grip, bleeding, his eyes squeezed shut.

"You want it," Guillam repeated, his legs shaking for no reason that he could account for but his voice steady. He could barely keep from grinding his cock against Tarr's exposed backside, trapped as it was in his trousers. His hair fell over his face, but he made no move to brush it away; his cheeks were burning. "You want it. Say so. Fucking _say_ so."

"Yes," Tarr said, his face screwed up in pain.

"No, _tell me_ ," Guillam insisted, shaking him by the hair, pulling him backwards by the hip until his arse thudded against Guillam's trapped cock. "Tell me you bloody well want this, you liar. Tell me."

Spluttering blood upward like a failing fountain, clutching for handholds that weren't there on the wall in front of him and leaving bloody smeared fingerprints in his wake, Tarr gurgled, "Ow. Ye--fuck."

Guillam slackened his death grip on Tarr's hair only enough to let his head droop against the cold breize blocks which had so recently transformed his face into a study in crimson.

"Please," Tarr wheezed. He made a feeble gesture with his arms; whether warding Guillam off or pulling him closer, it was impossible to tell. His face slid down the wall and with a twitch and a heave he brought his arms before him again, trying to save himself from putting all his weight on his scalp in Guillam's hand. "Please. Please."

"You want me to fuck you," Guillam said, his breath uneven and his voice, finally, low and steady. He pulled back on Tarr's hip unconsciously, pushed forward against him until the friction made him giddy and furious. "Say that."

"Please fuck me," Tarr agreed, trying to brace himself away from the wall, his voice hollow. "please fuck me, _sir_."

Something terrible and great and unstoppable howled through Peter Guillam's body, alarming him as it aroused him. He slipped his hand from Tarr's hip, across his stomach, to touch his cock: it was as hard as Guillam's. Either Tarr wasn't lying, or he was lying so well that he'd convinced himself, and Tarr had never been a very _good_ liar - only a frequent one.

From Tarr's mouth a boneless, unplanned sound came like the blood from his nose: unbidden, driven by violent need, unstoppable and - Guillam shoved the thought aside as hard as he could - as antagonistic to his libido.

Guillam batted at his trouser fastenings with a single, clumsy hand. His fingers lost all their dexterity, became stupid in the face of lust. It took more will-power than he thought he had to keep from mindlessly thrusting at Tarr before his cock was free.

He only succeeded in removing his trousers and underpants as far as the lower reaches of his arse before giving up on undressing further and flinching his shirt-tails ham-fistedly away from himself. Guillam leaned forward again, his weight on Tarr's bare back, Tarr's unsteady legs and weakly-braced arms the only things keeping them from crashing to the floor. 

His cock fit hand-in-glove between the hemispheres of Tarr's arse, and for a moment he only tugged Tarr back into himself, letting his cock rest in the warmth of someone else's skin.

"What--" Tarr began.

"Shut up."

Guillam lifted one arsecheek away from the other with the flat of his hand, still unwilling to take his hand from Tarr's hair, and without so much as spitting on it, pushed his thumb slowly into Tarr's arsehole.

" _Hrk_ ," Tarr said, dipping and leaning forward, away from him. Their precarious tableaux came close to danger, but Tarr scrabbled at the wall and pushed his blood-sodden face into the crooks of his elbows, and regained his balance.

"Keep still," Guillam muttered, his voice guttural and not as coherent as he might have hoped.

He pushed his thumb further inside, his hand hampered by his cock above it, by the position, by the thudding of his heart. There was, in the back of his mind, the horrifying knowledge that someone might come to see why the lights of Hut Fourteen were on, and walk into the watch-room.

"God," Tarr said under his breath, and pushed his face more firmly into his forearms. 

Guillam tugged his head back hard enough that, once again, their fragile entanglement could have fallen to the floor, and hard enough to make Tarr gulp for his suddenly-abated air.

"Shut up," Guillam elaborated, and he pushed his thumb inside Tarr to its base. Tarr's body contracted in alarm around his digit, but he made no further complaint.

This was, Guillam realised as he eased his thumb slowly, slowly out again, where Tarr's lack of experience in this was in his favour. There would be no questions about whether he had Vaseline. There would be nothing.

_I don't have to be kind to you,_ Guillam thought, with the electric shock of understanding in his brain and an urge in his balls that was too urgent to be understood yet. He pressed his thumb back inside Tarr's body and got an answering sigh that sounded as broken as it was appreciative. _You don't matter. I don't have to care about you at all. **I could do anything**._

Curiously, this thought did not drive him to further cruelty but instead moved him to bend, awkward and uncomfortable and almost fully-clothed, his thumb inside Tarr's arse and his cock resting against the small of his back, and kiss him very hesitantly on some unremarkable place on his spine.

"What--" Tarr began, muffled by his slack mouth and rendered imbecilic by his position. 

"Shut up," Guillam repeated.

He withdrew his thumb, and as Tarr flinched gently, toed the mass of jeans that pooled around the man's ankles until he moved his feet further apart.

Guiding his cock inside Tarr one-handed, nearly overbalancing, his heart thundering, was such a feat that Guillam might have cheered himself for achieving it, had Tarr not inhaled a messy-sounding breath in obvious pain and distracted him.

Guillam shoved Tarr's head against the wall so abruptly he barely had any conception of having done so; it was the shocked whimper and the renewed barrage of heartbeats that informed him. He seized Tarr's hip and gritted his teeth against some vile exhortation that formed in his head without bidding or grammatical foundation; he pushed forward with his hips, with his hand against Tarr's face. His fingers remained half-tangled up in Tarr's hair, tearing it from his scalp as his blunt fingernails dug into unshaven cheeks.

Tarr had stopped protesting, and from what Guillam could see of his face, what he could focus on at all, he had closed his eyes and had curled one arm around the side of his head to try to protect it. Blood streaked his forearms, the wall, and patches of his face that his hands had touched: it was drying, setting dark brown and black without the vivid splashes of bright red to guide Guillam's eye.

It had been an uncountable number of days since Peter Guillam had last felt a real human body warm and soft around his cock like this, and despite his best attempts not to, he could just about remember the last time.

"Jesus," Tarr said under his breath, as Guillam slammed his head particularly hard against the wall, his hips particularly hard into Tarr's arse. Tarr lost his grip temporarily, and there was a dull _thud_ as his skull struck the breize blocks. "Please don't--"

He didn't finish the sentence, but the words 'kill me' formed themselves in Guillam's head in their absence from the air. He meant to laugh at the absurdity of it, the sad inexperience of a man who seemed to think he could be sodomised _to death_ , but somehow it came out of Guillam's mouth as an ugly sob.

 

The sound echoed around the narrow mint-green room.

_I hate you,_ Guillam thought with real desperation, trying to shove Tarr's head at the wall again, his shoulders shaking. _I fucking hate you. What have you **done** to me?_

Tarr threw up an arm to fight Guillam's hand away from his head, whining like a frightened dog, and Guillam let his forehead rest briefly on Tarr's cold-sweat-slippery back. His hair poked him in the eyes, his hand on Tarr's hip seemed grafted to the skin, digging in hard. Guillam shuddered through his spine, thrusting in short, sharp, heavily-angled strokes.

The sobbing didn't stop.

If anything it intensified, shaking him as if some great hand had him in its grasp and was wringing everything from him at once. Guillam doubled over, his hand sliding down Tarr's thigh, and clutched blindly with his other hand at where he believed Tarr's face to be.

His body was hot, heavy, and frantic for release, and he could not stop _crying_ ; Guillam felt certain in this moment that he was going mad, and that Tarr would, perhaps even with some regret, be forced to kill him. He thought in that moment that he wouldn't mind, blind to the greater consequences of his death in these circumstances.

Tarr's hand touched Guillam's. He might have been trying to cover his head again, but he locked his fingers around Guillam's all the same, and clung on.

_No_ , Guillam thought, rattled. But his fingers would not cooperate, and he gripped tighter. His hips would not cooperate, and he kept moving. He turned his head, biting at Tarr's back to stifle the unceasing sobs.

When he came, it was almost painful. 

The friction on his cock made itself known rapidly in the aftermath; he felt sore, shaken, and cold, and pulling out _hurt_.

A final time, Guillam almost overbalanced them both. He staggered back, releasing Tarr's fingers and thigh, and tripped over his own foot. For a moment he thought he might fall, crack his own skull on the floor and die in this room, his cock softening and his arse bare, but he regained his balance and stood panting and exhausted with one arm extended to nothing.

Tarr huddled against the wall, his face a death mask of dried, smeared blood, his hair standing at irrational angles, his cock comically hard. Guillam found he could observe him dispassionately now: he looked ridiculous, and he looked ill.

He caught Guillam's eye with his own puffy stare, and said, "Come on. Please."

"What?" Guillam asked, stuffing himself back into his underpants with a fastidiousness that was made a mockery of by the state of his cock, and the errant blood upon his trousers. He pulled down his shirt tails, and yanked his trousers up over them.

Tarr made a vague, shaky gesture towards his cock. "You just --"

Guillam shook his head, and did up his trousers. His head felt cold. His face was wet with tears, his mouth dry, and he found he wanted very badly not to look at Ricki Tarr anymore.

There were smudges of blood along the sides of his hands.

"No."

"Please."

"I'll be, I'll be," Guillam said, pointing to the wall of thick glass separating the watch-room from what was effectively a cell. "I'll be in the watch-room."

"Right," said Tarr, sliding down the wall in a graceless, shuddering descent, clutching at his head with one hand. "Right."

"He's not coming here, he's staying in --" Guillam knew he had lied about the location of the safe house, but he couldn't for the life of him remember where he had claimed it was. All he knew was that he must avoid saying 'Holloway'. "-- the flat. Having his _face_ taken care of." The admonitory tone fell flat rather in the face of Tarr's virulent and vibrant patchwork of bruises. 

He wondered if it _had_ been Fawn who had kicked that bruise into his stomach.

"Right," Tarr repeated, trying to pull his jeans up, one-handed and slumped on the floor with a persistent erection.

"I'll be in the watch-room," Guillam repeated. He wondered how long he should stay there. He wanted rather badly to return to his flat. The shower was exerting a siren call to him; Smiley might yet have a need for him. Outside the high window, night was complete and black in a way it never was in the city; the heavy clouds in London would be tarnished dirty orange with reflections of the streetlights, but here at Sarratt there was only a thick blanket of blackness.

Tarr nodded, and nodded, like a drunk under a bridge whose neck and nerves no longer allowed him to do otherwise. "Right," he said, shuffling his hips upward to pull his jeans over them. 

At some point the bandage had entirely unwound from his knuckles and fallen onto the floor, and Guillam saw the dirty, dark-red scrapes across the back of his hand.

"You're not going to ask why I said --"

"Ricki," Guillam said, reaching for the door handle. "Fuck off."

Tarr nodded a few more times, and made a pathetic and unproductive attempt to wipe crusted blood from the underside of his nose with the back of his hand. "Can I have the, uh, the first aid. The first aid kit. Please."

Guillam nodded as spasmodically as Tarr had. "I'll bring it in." 

He had his hand on the handle, the key in the lock ready to let himself out, when Tarr said, "Sir."

Guillam let out a breath he hadn't been aware he was holding. Tarr only ever called him "sir" when he wanted something. "What?"

"Thank you."

**Author's Note:**

> YES I KNOW I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME EITHER.


End file.
